10 mistakes rookie guitarists make

Avoid clangers with our guide to what not to do

Practicing alone

When you’re learning the guitar, particularly if you’re self-taught, it’s easy to make mistakes without realising it, but here are 10 clangers that you should try and avoid from the start…

Rock ’n’ roll doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither should your practice regime. If you haven’t been playing along with a backing track, a metronome or, better still, a flesh-and blood fellow guitarist, you’ll be sniffed out at your first audition as having the timing of a myopic pensioner playing bat-the-rat at a village fête. In other words: stop playing with yourself.

Avoiding theory

Actually, a bit of practical theory can speed up your journey to Wembley, letting you transpose songs for your singer’s hopeless bark, locate chord substitutions anywhere on the neck, and understand which notes sound good under which progressions. If you find yourself shouting “moderato!” at the drummer, you may have taken this too far.